The Hidden Library: Home

Mobile Non-Textual Searches

Leafsnap is the first in a series of electronic field guides being developed by researchers from Columbia University, the University of Maryland, and the Smithsonian Institution. This free mobile app uses visual recognition software to help identify tree species from photographs of their leaves.

Leafsnap contains beautiful high-resolution images of leaves, flowers, fruit, petiole, seeds, and bark. Leafsnap currently includes the trees of the Northeast and will soon grow to include the trees of the entire continental United States.

Search by taking a picture: point your mobile phone camera at a painting, a famous landmark, a barcode or QR code, a product, a storefront, or a popular image. If Goggles finds it in its database, it will provide you with useful information.
Goggles can read text in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Turkish, and translate it into other languages.

a multimedia version of Barlow and Morgenstern's Dictionary of Musical Themes; search by composer, note (solfeggio), or category of music and hear MIDI versions of common themes from the Western canon

Abstract

As resources become increasingly full content, and more metadata – color, image size, modification date – are exposed, how is search technique implicated? What discovery systems can we create and enable for non-digital, non-textual items such as music LPs and visual resources so that additional metadata can be exploited and different surrogates created? Join librarians working in research instruction, music, and information systems to explore search and discovery that can expose “the hidden library.”

What does the Future Hold?

Twitter Test

Library Terms

For Further Reading

Running with scissors isn't recommended for kids, but it might be ideal for your next big development project. With interfaces becoming more complex and schedules growing shorter, the best prototyping tools may be simpler than you think.